The fascination of AI (as in Artificial Intelligence) is the meeting of two of the most notable minds of the cinema: Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg.
Kubrick developed AI from one of Brian Aldiss’s stories, but was unable to bring it to the state he wanted, and so abandoned it. Or not quite — shortly before he died, he passed it on to Spielberg. Was he giving his would-be protégé his leftovers? Perhaps the main reason Kubrick let the project lapse was because to have completed the film would have been to repeat himself (his 2001: A Space Odyssey, in particular), at least in part, and Kubrick never repeated himself.
At any rate, it is unclear how much of Kubrick’s original work is left in AI; the script as it stands is entirely by Spielberg, and it is very much a Spielberg film, though with distinctive touches of Kubrick.
The story is as follows. Some time in the future, a firm called Cybertronics of New Jersey has developed robotics to such a pitch that they can envisage a ”mecha” (a mechanical being) that can be programmed to love. A mother and father whose child has met with an accident and is in suspended animation are selected as the recipients of a trial model of a robo-child that can, indeed, be made to love. And so David (a cute, sometimes cloying Haley Joel Osment) comes to live with the Swintons (Sam Robards and Frances O’Connor).
Without giving too much of the plot away, David comes to be abandoned by his putative parents, and goes on an odyssey across this futuristic world, accompanied by a talking teddy and, for some of the way, by a ”love model” robot, Gigolo Joe (Jude Law), who keeps going into little vaudevillian routines for no apparent reason. (Who on earth programmed this sex machine?) David’s quest is to accomplish what Pinocchio did in the story that has understandably captured his imagination: to become a real boy. Why? So that his mother will truly love him. Having been made to love, he wants love in return.
Here is a profound theme, but Spielberg doesn’t go much further than stating the obvious. Can a robot-child that has been taught to love not, equally, learn to hate? One could get quite Freudian about it. Kubrick, certainly, would have explored such ambiguities, for all his legendary lack of emotional thrust. The joke that the most compelling character in all Kubrick’s work is the computer Hal in 2001 has some aptness; his people are often treated coldly, reduced to victims of fate, sometimes as stylised as automata. That is not necessarily a problem if one treats Kubrick’s films as something other than straightforward realism, but it does leave one emotionally disengaged in many of his movies. Spielberg’s great talent as a filmmaker (and constructor of fairytales) is to find a way to extort feeling from even the most resistant viewer. Thus, in this bizarre intersection of the Kubrickian and the Spielbergian, it is no surprise that the most engaging and loveable character in AI is the semi-sentient teddy bear.
There is much to intrigue and to entrance in AI — the way ordinary people might react to the presence of almost-human robots in their world, for instance. The Flesh Fair sequence, where renegade robots are destroyed in ingenious, spectacular ways, amid the exhortations of an evangelical robot-hunter, is very powerful; it is imagined with extraordinary, repulsive beauty. The emotional turbulence suffered by David’s ”mother” in relation to this creature who loves her so convincingly though she knows he is merely a robot — as well as the family rivalries that develop — could have provided an entire movie on its own, instead of just the first act of this three-part, two-and-a-half-hour movie. So could the Flesh Fair and later Rouge City passages, when the movie begins to glance at the broader social picture of a world teetering on the brink of post-humanity.
But Spielberg is simply using such scenes and ideas to set up the big emotional pay-off. A full exploration of the issues involved has to be abandoned; after all, what with making the movie look so magnificent as well as pulling our heartstrings so determinedly, he can’t be expected to think very carefully about his themes too.
As it stands, those themes seem strangely dated. The idea of robots encroaching on human territory feels like an old notion (though Jean-Claude van Damme is still working on it). Today, we are much more concerned with the implications of cloning — a more likely future way of creating pliable servitors or substitute people than robots. The Simpsons of AI would have had their comatose son cloned, which would, in fact, have made a very interesting movie plot. In this respect, Blade Runner was ahead of its time in the same way AI is behind it.
Moreover, the assumption that emotion can be programmed in the same way as the constituent calculations of artificial intelligence can be programmed is one only old-style behaviourists or Scientologists will accept. In fact, AI hasn’t got much to do with artificial intelligence at all, but rather with the mechanical simulation of emotion. In that light, and given the Spielbergian sentimentality, the movie should perhaps have been called Artificial Emotion instead.